With a rich yet fictional backstory, NN Swinton is a love letter to Swiss and American grotesques

Synergising human and AI strengths, NN Swinton and its development are far from the expected. Crafted by Nouvelle Noire Type Foundry, the grotesque promises a touch of magic with its sharply-cut letterforms. Taking a unique approach in its introduction, Swinton is accompanied by a fictional backstory, a creation brought to life with the help of AI. Told with the help of ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, Nouvelle Noire recount the ambitions of fictional designer Cram Zord, who built NN Swinton with a standardised look but incorporated the type with unexpected details, sparking joy and enchantment among those who use it. “When you are releasing a new typeface you don’t really have many use cases to showcase the typeface,” the (real) designer Marc Droz explains. For fun, the team had been playing around with generating showcase imagery with Stable Diffusion, while also writing fictional text with ChatGPT. “What at first sight was meant to be a joke, turned out to reveal itself as a communication concept,” he continues. As for the typeface itself, the design’s origin stems from two different sources of inspiration – classic Swiss grotesques such as Helvetica and Akzidenz Grotesk, and American grotesques like Trade Gothic or Franklin Gothic, culminating in a versatile typeface that infuses an expressive character into every design. “There was a very clear intention not to copy these historical design patterns,” Droz notes. “The aim was to create an independent design that takes the idea of these earlier references forward without reproducing them.”